Working Fashion: The Man Who Nabs Gatecrashers

For Fashion Week, Metropolis contributor Jo Piazza is going beyond the runways to find the little-noticed workers who make the glitzy event possible. In the fourth installment of Working Fashion, she meets the man who guards the iconic white tents. (See more posts in this series and get complete coverage of Fashion Week at WSJ’s Heard on the Runway blog.)

Amy Sussman for The Wall Street Journal

Security chief Ty Yorio patrols the entrance to New York Fashion Week.

Ty Yorio can spot a fashion-show crasher faster than a designer can identify a counterfeit handbag.

“There’s a nervous energy about them,” explained Mr. Yorio, the security chief at Mercedes-Benz New York Fall Fashion Week and the head of Brooklyn-based Citadel Security Agency, as he monitored the steps leading to the white tents. “Their obvious evasion gives them away. They’re looking down at their BlackBerry or wearing sunglasses.”

“The only legit person wearing sunglasses here is Anna Wintour,” added Yorio’s son David, who does business development for Citadel.

In his more than 45 seasons working Fashion Week, Yorio the elder has heard a lot of tall tales from the uninvited. Crashers try to imitate fashion editors they’ve read about in magazines or seen on TV.

But Ty Yorio has never actually had to turn away a crasher trying to impersonate Ms. Wintour, the famously intimidating editor of Vogue. Although he said he once rejected a woman impersonating Wintour’s 6-foot-7 male sidekick (and Vogue contributing editor) André Leon Talley.

Fashion Week crashers are an indignant breed. They all truly believe they are meant to be inside among the glamorous set. Rousting one from a show or kicking one out of the tents altogether is a careful dance of propriety in which the security team strives not to upset the equilibrium of the runway crowds.

During a show last week, a woman who was very obviously not the actress Rosario Dawson tried to sit in Rosario Dawson’s front-row seat. “We asked her to leave the seat,” Ty Yorio said. “She sat in the aisle. We had to ask the guys to escort her out.”

His typical approach is an unusual mix of humane compassion, interpersonal intimidation and a bit of public shaming: “We smile and look them in the eye while we are telling them to leave.”

To prevent fake starlets from even entering the property, the Citadel crew has five bouncer-style security men and sometimes one or both Yorios on the steps at the front entrance doing a soft check, weeding out the obvious interlopers.

The total security team for Fashion Week is around 75; Ty Yorio declines to give an exact number. The group includes both men and women, all veterans of the police, the courts or the military. The women officers form the backstage army, protecting the inner sanctum where the models undress.

Members of the security team all don wash-and-wear black suits by Ecogir, made from recycled bottles. At least half of the current team has been working Fashion Week for more than a decade, and all of them have been hired through referral by another team member.

Besides his son, Ty Yorio’s right-hand guys are Tom and Mike Carney from Queens. The brothers, a court officer and former transit police officer, respectively, maintain a Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern-style banter that keeps the crew laughing while they stand on their feet for eight-hour shifts.

Don’t get the Carneys started on who is the more fashionable brother. They can wax for hours on who has an uglier mug. They have been working Fashion Week since 1994, one year after Ty Yorio’s firm won a bidding war to handle security for the first tented fashion event in Bryant Park.

At age, 64, Ty Yorio has the energy of a man at least thirty years younger. He is onsite at Lincoln Center from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. Factoring in his thirty-minute drive from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, he gets five hours or less of sleep each night during the week.

He is also in constant phone contact with his son David, 31, who started working Fashion Week duty when he was just 17. Before committing full-time to Citadel, David Yorio spent four years as a high school math teacher and basketball coach. In 2009, he got his MBA from Georgetown and decided to help his father full time.

Despite the constant communication, father and son somehow don’t get sick of each other.

“When this week is over, I will call him up and we will start talking about the next one,” Ty Yorio said. David agreed with a vigorous head nod: “I talk to my father more than I talk to anyone else.”